By Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Some of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts hit so hard, viewers may be grateful to come across one that simply follows donkeys visiting an observatory in the desert — even if it bumps up against the very boundaries of the genre.

‘All the Empty Rooms’

Director Joshua Seftel hadn’t spoken with his former colleague, longtime CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman, in 25 years. Then Hartman, famed for stories of human kindness and compassion, reached out: He and photojournalist Lou Bopp had been documenting bedrooms left behind by children killed in American school shootings.

“I said to him, ‘This could be a great film,’” says Seftel, though Hartman asked not to be in it. “I said, ‘You are the “Good News Guy” and people trust you. If the Good News Guy is telling you he’s got some bad news, people are going to listen.’ ”

The rooms provide silent testament to those who once lived there. One is festooned in SpongeBob memorabilia; another contains the rack on which a girl would arrange her outfits for the week.

“You meet these families and hear the stories and there’s a heaviness” in the rooms, says Seftel. He says he could see them weigh on Bopp and Hartman. A filmmaker friend, on seeing the film, told Seftel, “Steve Hartman is a haunted man.”

‘Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud’

Brent Renaud and his brother, Craig, made documentaries in Haiti, Egypt, Iraq and other hot spots, and won awards for their portrait of a troubled Chicago school. Then, while covering the war in Ukraine, Brent was killed by Russian soldiers.

“For Brent, it was always a focus on people caught in the middle of conflicts,” says Craig Renaud. “Going back to the front lines over and over again, we often had to be on the ground for months at a time in these war zones.”

Included in the clips of Brent Renaud’s work: a weeping Iraqi woman clutching the bloody jeans of her slain son; Renaud interviewing a Honduran boy embarking on the hazardous trek to the U.S. on his own; and a Somali man telling Renaud, “The way you hold the camera, you’re doing it from your heart.”

It also includes casual mention of his diagnosis as neurodivergent.

“He’s calm as a monk in a firefight,” Craig Renaud says, “but a cocktail party in Brooklyn is absolutely terrifying.”

‘Children No More: Were and Are Gone’

In Tel Aviv, a group of Israeli protesters stands silently, holding posters emblazoned with the faces of Palestinian children who have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.

“They didn’t choose to be part of this war,” says Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia. “They were killed not because they brought it on themselves, but because someone decided they needed to die.”

Medalia’s film follows activists whose silent vigils draw both support and condemnation. So far, despite sometimes having to abandon their protests when situations become potentially threatening, they remain undaunted.

“Their focus is to stop the war and this war crime and other things that are happening in our name, and to force the general public to confront those images and to look at the kids and to feel for them,” Medalia says. “It’s amazing to me how humanity and compassion become an act of resistance.”

‘The Devil Is Busy’

At a women’s health clinic in Atlanta, a typical day includes religious protesters on megaphones (“All men,” points out co-director Geeta Gandbhir) and women seeking help only to discover their pregnancies are just past the six-week mark, making terminating them illegal in Georgia.

“We decided to focus on the providers,” says Gandbhir. “They’re putting themselves at risk to provide care. What you see are the hurdles they face.”

Co-director Christalyn Hampton says the burdens on these independent clinics have drastically increased as about 50 Planned Parenthood sites closed last year. She points out the spectrum of healthcare provided and the complexity of situations for both patients, many of whom must travel considerable distances, and providers.

“When the technician is giving the young lady a sonogram, the [patient] goes through several emotions: She’s happy, she’s crying, she’s nervous. That speaks to the vulnerability these women feel when they have to make certain decisions. That emotional moment [reminds us] of that human aspect.”

‘Perfectly a Strangeness’

A trio of donkeys traverses a desert to an observatory. Captured with creative camera angles and accompanied by an imaginative score, Alison McAlpine’s film pushes the boundaries of what documentaries are.

While shooting her previous feature in Chile, McAlpine noticed donkeys hanging out around an observatory. “We hired three gentle donkeys [for the film]. It was a combination of trying to direct the donkeys up from the valley to the observatory, and sometimes we just followed the donkeys.”

McAlpine acknowledges that her film has been difficult to categorize. “Sometimes it’s at IDFA, which is an international documentary festival. Sometimes it’s just competing with fiction, where it’s been lucky to win awards sometimes. But what is a documentary? As soon as you put on a lens and a frame, it’s a personal document, not something objective.

“I’ve been moved because people have been touched; they seem to be transported elsewhere, which is what one wants as a filmmaker.”

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — To get to the “Sinners” exhibit on the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, you have to navigate past the backlot’s iconic water tower, cross through the New York Street and then skirt city hall and the fountain from the opening credits of “Friends.” Eventually, you wind up at Stage 48, home of the Central Perk Cafe, a gift shop selling all manner of “Friends” bric-a-brac and offering a smattering of knockoff furniture from Monica’s palatial apartment to enjoy.

Comparatively, the newly installed “Sinners” showcase, featuring costumes and a couple of props, is, to use a real estate agent’s euphemism, “cozy,” certainly smaller than Rachel’s closet. On the night of its opening, “Sinners” production designer Hannah Beachler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw are inside sitting on a sofa — not the sofa, but close enough. A few hours ago, they were celebrating with their fellow Oscar nominees at the academy’s annual luncheon.

“She’s a regular,” Arkapaw says, her arm around Beachler, who won an Oscar in 2019 for her work on “Black Panther.”

The two women and the rest of the “Sinners” team have been hobnobbing with Oscar and guild voters for months now and talking about their work on the film, which was released in April, for even longer. At the time of this “Sinners” event on the Warner Bros. lot, which included yet another screening of the movie for guild members, the Oscars were still more than a month away.

“I can believe it,” Beachler says. Adds Arkapaw: “Me too. I’m stressing about the stuff they’re having us doing. But I think Teyana Taylor said it best: ‘Don’t be complaining about answered prayers.’”

“Sinners” had a lot of prayers answered when Oscar nominations were announced last month — 16, to be precise.

Now the question is whether that record-breaking haul might be enough to catapult Ryan Coogler’s genre-defying American horror story to a best picture Oscar victory.

When it opened in September, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” immediately took the pole position in the best picture race, and it remains the front-runner. But all those “Sinners” Oscar nominations do complicate things. Put it this way: When you submit your movie in 16 different categories and hit in each and every one of them, you have a film boasting broad support across a dozen voting branches. That’s significant.

And if you’re a voter and you weren’t necessarily a fan of the film — or had put off watching it because the horror genre gives you pause — the nominations total does something else. It prompts you to take stock. What is everyone else seeing? Maybe you watch “Sinners” again. Maybe you finally clear the deck and press play for the first time. Perhaps you see that it’s just as much a movie of the moment as “One Battle,” what with the unapologetic, overt racism coming from the White House.

So if you’re on the fence and you do reconsider “Sinners,” maybe it’s not a complete reversal. But it might be enough for you to put the movie higher on your ranked ballot when you vote for best picture.

As you may know, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses a preferential ballot for the best picture category and only the best picture category. When the academy’s 10,136 voting members mark their ballots this year, they cast a single vote in 23 of the 24 Oscar categories. The nominee with the most votes wins.

For best picture, though, members are instructed to rank the 10 nominated movies. The system, in place since the academy expanded the best picture field from five to 10 nominees in 2009, is designed to reflect the wishes of the greatest number of voters. This means that the winner is sometimes not the movie that is most passionately loved but the picture that is most generally liked — or, if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, the picture that is least disliked.

The process works like this: Once voting ends, PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants sort the best picture ballots and place them in stacks based on members’ No. 1 votes. They then eliminate the movie with the fewest first-place votes, giving those votes to each ballot’s second-ranked film. The process continues — smallest stacks eliminated, votes redistributed to the next choice down — until one movie has more than 50% of the vote.

The math to “Sinners” winning best picture necessitates it being the No. 1, 2 or 3 choice on more ballots than “One Battle After Another.” And that plays into what a couple of awards consultants told me about the psychological effect the movie’s record-breaking 16 nominations might have on voters when they rank the nominated movies.

“Maybe it’s not your favorite, but you still rank it high because of that overwhelming level of respect,” says one rival campaigner. “Who knows if the math adds up. But at this point in the season, you’re looking for any advantage you can find.”

A test of that math will come Saturday at the Producers Guild Awards, a ceremony that uses the same preferential ballot system to determine its best picture. The PGA winner more often than not repeats at the Oscars, though in the last decade there have been two notable exceptions — “Moonlight” besting PGA winner “La La Land” in 2017 and, three years later, “Parasite” taking the Oscar over “1917.”

Should “Sinners” prevail at the PGA and then the next night go on to win the cast prize at the Actor Awards (formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards), then the race will be dramatically recast. Both ceremonies take place in the middle of the window of final voting for the Oscars, which runs Feb. 26 through March 5.

“It’s a miracle that we were all nominated,” Beachler says. “That’s rare for everyone to get that recognition.”

For a film with a hero named Preacher Boy, one last miracle certainly isn’t out of the question. And if the last few months have taught us anything, it’s that you underestimate “Sinners” at your peril.

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.